Australia Schools To Send Online Degree Holders To The Back Of Jobs Line

In this July 27, 2017, photo, Job application paperwork is seen on a desk while Cheryl Bast of Omaha, left, is accompanied by her daughter Liz Pierson, as she works on an application for a position with Omaha Public Schools, during a job fair held at Omaha South High School in Omaha, Neb. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

The Department of Education in New South Wales (NSW) in Australia has raised a large warning flag on the value of online degrees.

Starting soon, under proposed new rules for the Department, applicants for Department teaching positions who earned their education degrees in online programs will be sent to the back of the applicant line, behind those with degrees earned in actual classrooms.

That’s a big deal for two reasons.

First, NSW isn’t some backwater outpost. It’s home to Sydney and the largest state in Australia with more than 7.5 million people. The NSW Department of Education, teaches more than 780,000 students, directly funds education for an added 410,000 students and runs more than 2,200 schools. If it were domestic, the NSW school district would be the second-largest district in the United States – it’s larger than the L.A. Unified District in both number of students and schools.

Second, those who insist that online degrees are equal to in-class degrees, should be alarmed. Although, they should not be surprised. Studies and surveys have shown this before.

One 2013 academic research study, for example, started with a favorable hypothesis that, “There will be no significant difference between employer perceptions of graduates from online universities towards the concept of employability, credibility and educational modalities.”

Once the researchers actually asked hiring managers, though, they found that, “ … employers perceived a traditional or hybrid modality more credible than a purely online modality across multiple industries.” And when hypothetical job candidates were given matching qualifications save for the type of degree, they found, “Half of the respondents indicated the On-campus student would be hired … and 12.6% saying the Online student would be hired.”

A Gallup poll of that same year found that by a whopping 36 points (13% to 49%) the public said that online studies were worse at, “providing a degree that will be viewed positively by employers.”

But what NSW schools is doing is different because it isn’t a study or a survey. There are no hypnotical job seekers. The devaluation of online degrees by NSW schools is an actual hiring policy. NSW schools are matter-of-factly saying, “you are less likely to be hired if you have an online degree.”

In higher education circles, that's seismic because, although there are a number of reasons to reject this framework, online education boosters have largely ignored the evidence and maintained that the hiring marketplace will make no distinction in how a degree was earned. And yet here’s an actual hiring marketplace – even an aligned market in which the field of study syncs with the career – making a clear and unfavorable distinction.

The NSW move to penalize those with online degrees is part of a broader move to improve the teacher applicant pool since universities began accepting and graduating more students with education degrees than there are available teaching jobs. NSW is also, for example, raising the minimum grades an applicant should have, taking a closer look at a candidate’s actual teaching experience and requiring a to-be-specified test of emotional and cognitive intelligence.

If you thought teachers themselves may object to the new standards, they don’t. According to reporting by Sydney’s Sunday Moring Herald, the teacher’s union, the NSW Teachers Federation, had no immediate issue with downgrading the hiring value of online learning. The Federation “welcomed” the new requirements, according to the article.

It says something that those who study, practice and administer teaching and learning have set this policy. It should say that they, just maybe, know what they are doing – that maybe there’s a real difference between what you learn online versus what you learn in person. Maybe those differences are especially significant when the career you want involves actually engaging with others, in person.

That’s conjecture. But what is not conjecture is that, when faced with an employment oversupply problem, hiring leaders raised their requirements and started parsing the applicant line – just as employers in any other field would. And when those cuts were made, one knife fell on online degrees.

When the U.S. economy retreats, as it inevitably will, and hiring managers once again have four or five or six qualified applicants for every job, they will bring out similar knives and look for ways to cut some people from the line. Then, as it has for a long time, it will probably matter whether the name at the top of a diploma says “Harvard” or “Strayer.” It may also matter whether an applicant scored that degree in a classroom or in front of a computer screen. Don’t bet it won’t. In some places it already does.